Snow days aren’t all child’s play

You have no idea how many times I have thanked the good Lord for creating me in this century.
He, in his infinite wisdom, knew exactly what he was doing when he put me in a time period blessed with hot running water and warm toasty furnaces.
Pioneer. Granted, I wouldn’t have survived pioneer life long enough to complain about it much. I would have been one of those people with a life expectancy somewhere around 12. I would have never ‘gone west’.
If by some serious misalignment of fate I had been talked into it by my pioneer equivalent of Mr. Wonderful (he would have been a cowboy, I’m sure of it) and loaded up my belongings in a covered wagon and then gotten caught in a winter storm along the way, well, let’s just say I have the utmost faith Mr. Wonderful would have arranged for me to “accidentally” tumble out of the buckboard somewhere along the trail.
Fortunately, I am blessed by the aforementioned modern conveniences that allow me to never leave my house for vast stretches of time (I’m aspiring to be a hermit and getting quite good at it) and to work from home in my pajamas.
Thus, I can find joy in the kind of things that make most adults crazy. Yes, I am a 9-year-old stuck in a 30-something body and I love snow days.
I check the early news obsessively for the possibility of a snow day from Thanksgiving until mid-March.
I enjoy and even welcome the snow, knowing I have nowhere to go and take the opportunity to snuggle up with some candles, a good book, and whatever chocolate I have managed to ferret from the latest hiding place the children have tried to no avail.
A snow day captures that “get out of jail free card” feeling perfectly.
Degrees. Granted, this is difficult when all this ferreting out and relaxing is done directly in the line of sight of my little-ones-who-should-be-at-school-but-aren’t-because-this-morning-it-was-minus-10-degrees-out.
(What’s so wrong with minus 10 degrees? A nice round double-digit number, it is.)
Even as a stay-at-home-mom, my mornings are hectic. I do have a “job” and it’s to get this rocket we call daily life off the launchpad.
Nonetheless, I think my body knows when it should have a snow day today. At 6 a.m., I try to wake up, really I do.
Sleep keeps pulling me back in. At 7:10 a.m. I finally get myself into the shower. I emerge from the steamy bathroom to the incessant ring of the telephone.
Our 9-year-old shouts “I got it!” and a few moments later I heard a shriek of delight.
“Snow day! It’s a snow day! Zack (the neighbor) says it’s a snow day!!!”
This is followed immediately by my 7-year-old saying, gravely, “Well, we really should check the television and the Web site to see if it’s TRUE.”
My, how things have changed.
I had a clock radio by my bed (one of the early ones with the slips of numbers on rolodex-like pages that actually flipped every minute), and before I’d climb out from under the warm covers, I’d turn on the local